Ferry Survivors Describe a Night of Horror, Heroism : Sea disaster: 485 are still missing in sinking of Egyptian vessel. First officer’s actions questioned.

In the chilly afternoon breeze, the only sounds here Monday were the persistent pinging of a flag against a pole and the drone of a voice on a loudspeaker, calling out the names of the dead, the likely dead and the few who survived: “Mustafa Abdullah Abdelhafez. Mohammed Abdelaziz Abdullah. Sayed Abdelmajoud Sulieman. . . .”

The names from the passenger list of the ill-fated Salem Express fell over a silent crowd like the cold rain of the morning before. Most of the men here, dressed in the flowing robes and white turbans of Egyptian peasants, had driven all night from the farms of the Nile Valley to reach this dreary commercial port, where their relatives were to have docked Sunday morning on a routine ferry trip from Saudi Arabia.

Instead, for hours Monday, the anxious relatives squatted in an abandoned youth camp nearby, waiting for the first bodies to arrive from the vessel, wrecked on a coral reef 10 miles offshore.

No one said anything. Half a dozen workers cleared chairs from a cafeteria to create a viewing and identification area. Two truckloads of riot police, armed with bayonets and metal shields to fend off the bereaved, pulled into the lot. But still nobody moved, nobody said anything. They sat and waited for the next name.

“I’ve been to the port. I’ve been to the police station. I’ve been to the hospital. I’m dizzy from going to all these places,” said Fathi Mohammed Hassan, who spent the day in a futile search for a missing relative. “I’m waiting for God’s mercy to find out what happened. Maybe they’ll find him in the sea.”

After the second full day of search and rescue operations, up to 485 passengers and crew members from the Salem Express were still unaccounted for. Instead, there were dramatic tales of a hellish night at sea from the 179 known survivors of one of the world’s worst ferry disasters.

Egyptian authorities said Monday that they have detained seven surviving crew members in an attempt to learn how the ferry--which was nearing the end of its 36-hour journey from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to Safaga on Egypt’s Red Sea coast--moved off course on a treacherous approach into the harbor and slammed into the reef, sinking in just minutes.

Was it, as the ship’s second officer insists, because high winds blew the 1,104-ton vessel off course? Or was it, as some passengers and crew suggested in interviews, because the first officer was taking a shortcut into the harbor so the crew could get a full night’s sleep in Safaga?

“What’s clear is that (the ship) left the proper sea lanes, and whether it’s a human error or whether the winds drove it off course, we can’t say yet,” said an Egyptian investigating officer. “This question of whether they were trying to take a shortcut is a technical question that we can’t answer yet.”

But in interviews on Monday, survivors told of a routine ferry crossing, one of hundreds that ply the Red Sea between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, that turned into a night of horror and heroism, madness and miracles.

As the ferry neared port late Saturday, several members of the 71-member crew were in a lower-level lounge, watching a popular Egyptian movie. Others sipped coffee in a cafeteria below decks. Captain Hassan Khalil Moro was in his cabin--he normally didn’t pilot the ferry, except to guide it into the harbor, crew members said, and on most nights he rested quietly in his cabin until the final approach.

First Officer Mustafa Hamad Abdel Gowad was on the bridge piloting the vessel; Second Officer Khalid Mamdough Ahmed awoke in his cabin at about 11:10 p.m., ready to relieve Gowad at midnight.

Three minutes later, he said, a crash resounded through the ship, which began shaking hard. Ahmed rushed to the bridge and found Gowad. “I asked him what happened. He said, ‘The ship is grounded.’ ”

The ship had begun to list. Ahmed rushed to see what had happened, but the captain, who had beat him to it, brushed past and ran to the ship’s radio. Hanan Salah, the ship’s nurse, ran into the radio room and heard the captain transmit: “Hello, this is Salem Express. We are due to enter port at 11:30. We’re 30 kilometers offshore, and we’re sinking!”

“They responded, ‘Put down the lifeboats and save the passengers on board.’ The captain didn’t seem to know what to do. He didn’t seem to be awake,” Salah said. “He was informing the port that most of the passengers had come on deck and they were trying to readjust the boat. The captain just said to the people around him, ‘Let down the boats and save yourselves.’ ”

In fact, Ahmed said, it was too late. The ship was already sinking. The crew managed to get only one of the 10 lifeboats into the water, and a number of rubber rafts floated into the sea from the decks. The lights on the ferry were extinguished.

In about 11 minutes, the ship was under water, trapping hundreds of passengers still in their cabins on lower decks, despite some crew members’ attempts to rush to the lower cabins, yelling and banging on doors. But other crew members, angry passengers said, grabbed the available life vests and headed for the lifeboat, ignoring panicked passengers’ pleas for help.

Ahmed said he was helping lower the first lifeboat when a rush of water slammed him into the smokestack. “I said, for sure there is no time for thinking, and I jumped,” he said. “People were screaming and panicking. You know the Titanic? Just like the Titanic. I was on the boat, and then I looked back, and there was no sign of it at all.”

He said he was sucked down with the ship and grew disoriented in the dark water, unsure which way was up. But he fought his way to the surface and found the lone lifeboat close by. He made his way into it.

Meantime, as the ship was sinking, nurse Salah sought to open a box containing an inflatable life raft. She finally grabbed an oar as the water closed in, clinging to it with a man. They clutched the oar until 4 a.m., when they came across a rubber life raft filled with water but still bouncing in the huge, wind-whipped waves. Inside the raft were three bodies. Salah said her companion bailed the water from the boat; they then pulled 15 people aboard.

Everything was fine, she said, until 7 a.m., when high waves turned the boat over. Unable to hold on to its slippery underside, Salah found another man clinging to an oar and she grabbed it. About 9:30, she said, they spotted a ship 1 1/2 miles away. The man began to swim for it, although he apparently never made it as the ship sailed off. Salah waited until 11:30 a.m., when a tourist boat came by and rescued her.

Ismail Abdel Hassan, an agricultural engineer returning to Egypt after working eight months in Saudi Arabia, was standing on the ship’s deck as it went down. He floated to the surface. Hassan, who has competed in amateur long-distance swimming competitions, spotted the lights of Safaga in the distance and decided his best bet was to head for shore. He began swimming, with two other men clutching at his clothes.

He said he removed his clothes and told each man to grab one of his shoulders. But their heads kept falling into the water as he swam. They lasted only two hours. “I was trying to hold them with my two arms, and when I’d move, they’d go under water, and finally they just drowned,” he said.

Night turned into day, and Hassan kept swimming. Sometimes, he said, he would “white out”--disoriented, exhausted, unable to see. But he kept going, sustained by faith. “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet,” he said. “God is great. I was thinking about all the bad things I’ve done in my life--and regretting them.”

Suddenly, 18 hours after he had plunged into the water, Hassan’s head bumped sand. He collapsed on the shore.

Shaaban abu Siriya, who drove a truck in Saudi Arabia, is no long-distance swimmer, but he rushed to the deck from his cabin when he heard crew members screaming, “Go up! Go up!”

“It just sunk all at once, and I barely had time to get out,” he said.

Siriya said he floated on his back and kicked in the water until 3:30 a.m., when he found a floating wooden door, which three others were clinging to. He grabbed on, only to later watch as two of the men were wrenched away by crashing waves. Siriya and his remaining compatriot were rescued at noon the next day by a passing tourist launch.

Now, no one seems sure about precisely what happened. Ahmed, the second officer, said it is his job to chart the ship’s course, and no revisions were made in the routine approach to Safaga. But nurse Salah said the ferry had left Saudi Arabia a day ahead of schedule. She said some crew members appeared to be concerned that the ferry would not be able to make a full overnight stop at Safaga before sailing on to Suez.

Egyptian investigators said they had received no reports that the Salem Express deviated from its schedule. But agricultural engineer Hassan said he had made the ferry trip several times and knew the crew well. He was in the cafeteria talking with crew members when the accident occurred. Several crew members said the captain was in a hurry, he recalled.

On the other side of the hospital bed, shrieks suddenly erupted as Saad Hassanein, a carpenter who survived the accident, saw his cousin, Gamal Sayed, walk into the room. Hassanein sobbed uncontrollably. Sayed, wailing, had to be led back out into the hall.

Then Sayed collected himself, walked back into the room and clutched his cousin’s hand. He had driven all night from the family village in upper Egypt. His car had broken down on the way in Qena, and he had to spend the night there, not knowing. It had been too sudden, he said, seeing Hassanein safe and alive, even though their uncle was still missing.

“I saw him there in the bed from the end of the corridor,” Sayed said, “and I swear to God my heart jumped right into my head!”

Tears kept rolling down Hassanein’s cheeks, and he didn’t say anything.